Mirvac embraces the public cloud, migrating all critical workloads to AWS in under 7 months

Organisation

Mirvac embraces the public cloud, migrating all critical workloads to AWS in under 7 months

Industry

Property and Construction

Employees

1500+

Mirvac is a leading, diversified Australian property group, with an integrated development and asset management capability. Mirvac has 45 years of experience in the property industry and an unmatched reputation for delivering superior products and services across their businesses. Mirvac owns and manages assets across the office, retail and industrial sectors, with over $18 billion of assets currently under management. Their development activities allow them to create and deliver innovative and high-quality commercial assets and residential projects for customers, while driving long-term value for securityholders. Mirvac’s integrated approach gives a competitive advantage in the creation of quality assets across the entire lifecycle of a project; from planning through to design, construction and development, leasing, property management and long-term ownership.

BUSINESS OVERVIEW

Challenge

Mirvac
runs well over 100 workloads, including 180 Windows servers, from their headquarters
in Sydney. These workloads range from business critical to services needing
high compute and graphic intensive processes. A majority of these workloads are
Microsoft SQL Servers and other Windows specific applications.

The
migration needed to be completed quickly. The entire project was planned, implemented
and migrated within seven months without business outage.

“With
a clear Cloud strategy in place, we identified that we needed the help of a
strong and qualified partner to assist us in this ambitious and critical migration”
said Swati Singh, Mirvac’s General Manager, Technology.

To
deliver a more reliable infrastructure platform and one that could expand to
the needs of their business, Mirvac chose to migrate all critical workloads to
AWS. They identified 112 workloads which included 180 Windows servers hosting
these workloads. It was also mandated that the platform uphold the CIS benchmark once delivered so that Mirvac would feel
comfortable that the platform followed security best practices.

Solution

“Through
their consultative approach, Mirvac and Versent developed an ambitious but achievable
plan to deliver a successful migration without any disruption to Mirvac’s
business,” said Ms Singh.

Tim
Hope, G.M. at Versent, added, “We put in place an Enterprise Native Cloud
solution. This solution implements critical cloud security, compliance, and
foundational controls on AWS to support the migration and transformation of
workload into AWS. The solution was ratified by AWS Solution Architects, ensuring
it aligns with the Well Architected Framework.”

Versent
uses DevOps/Automation techniques to build an automated migration factory that
utilises migration specific tools, AWS
Discovery Service and CloudEndure’s migration tool Live Migration, to deliver migrations of the workloads in waves
into AWS. This approach enables rapid and consistent migration of Microsoft
Windows-based servers and Microsoft SQL Server databases.

Ms Singh commented,
"By migrating our current Microsoft workloads into a secure, monitored and
efficient AWS environment,t we are able to service our customers and
stakeholders more efficiently”.

Benefit

Following
the discovery phase of the program, Versent worked closely with Mirvac’s
infrastructure team to ensure that they not only understood the solution, but
could provide their input into the Cloud Platform.

Versent
put together a solution design which lay out the foundation for what would be
implemented into AWS. The design was put through the Well Architected Framework to assure Mirvac that what was being
implemented aligned with AWS best
practices.

Versent
implemented the Enterprise Native Cloud
which put in place the building blocks for all workloads that would be migrated
into AWS. This put in place the AWS account structure, security controls and
integration into Stax.io to provide
an operational lens for Mirvac. Mirvac had targeted 180 servers, which included
112 application workloads that would be the basis for the migration into AWS.

Versent
deployed the AWS Discovery Service across the fleet of servers to allow for all
inter-dependencies to be discovered. This meant that the team could understand
all the inter-dependencies between each workload and understand how that would
be migrated into AWS. This provided Versent with a key level of understanding
of each of the complexities amongst the workloads identified. This gave Mirvac
assurance that no integrations would be disrupted or missed during the
migrations.

Versent
partnered with CloudEndure,
utilising their product, Live Migration,
to facilitate data replication from all 180 servers. This was instrumental in
ensuring the least amount of downtime for the workloads and provided Mirvac with
confidence that all data would be replicated into AWS prior to any of the
migrations that would take place.

Versent
built a migration factory with automation at its core to orchestrate the
migration of all on-premises servers into AWS. This ensured that the repeatable
migration process was executed accurately and without error for all 180
servers. For each server, Versent worked closely with Mirvac to ensure that
they were both functionally and operationally accepted by all stakeholders
prior to any server being handed over. Once the workload was in AWS, Versent
worked closely with the operations team to put in place workload schedules to
optimise the usage and cost of these workloads.

Mirvac
can now leverage by design the reliability and scalability of AWS to provide
the business confidence that the platform will be able to scale with expected
growth from the business. The platform will also be able to take advantage of new
capabilities such as machine learning and AI. Examples of workloads that were
transformed and migrated include Render – a Windows/Microsoft 3D video
rendering workload which the Mirvac designers and developers use on a day-to-day
basis. For Mirvac, this is a critical app that is at the core of their business
– designing and building environmentally and sustainable properties.

Ms
Singh concluded, “Mirvac’s technology team gained significant benefits from
this program. We were able to leverage and grow our skillsets, provide
confidence back to the business, and have an effective platform to deliver the
technology and business priorities Mirvac.”